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Forum rules
This forum is meant for general questions about the usability of OCS from an everyday user's perspective: conference managers, presenters, and directors are welcome to post questions here, as are librarians and other support staff. We welcome general questions about the role of OCS and how the workflow works, as well as specific function- or user-related questions.

What to do if you have general, workflow or usability questions about OCS:

1. Read the documentation. We've written documentation to cover from OCS basics to system administration and code development, and we encourage you to read it.

2. take a look at the tutorials. We will continue to add tutorials covering OCS basics as time goes on.

3. Post a question. Questions are always welcome here, but if it's a technical question you should probably post to the OCS Technical Support subforum; if you have a development question, try the OCS Development subforum.

Hi, I would like to relax the blind review procedure of abstracts and letting the reviewer see not only the abstract's title and text but also authors name and affiliation. I did not find a simple way to do that.I see two possibilities:1) editing the submission.tpl file for adding the authors name and affiliation (e.g., adding a "$submission->getPresenterString()");2) changing the way reviewers can view the submission Metadata: actually I noticed that clicking on "view Metadata" as a reviewer I cannot see the entire submission Metadata nor the text of the abstract (which was visible in the reviewer assignement page). I see just this:

View MetadataTitle and AbstractTitle...............This is the title of the abstract (i.e., the correct title)Abstract......... Array

i.e., "Abstract" does not show the actual abstract's text but just the word "array". I verified that this is done also if the reviewer is, e.g., the conference director. Is this normal or do I make something wrong?

As for displaying the author's name in the reviewer's submission, your first possibility will work just fine (just make sure its the templates/reviewer/submission.tpl file you're editing)--But if you want to get the author's affiliations as well, you'll have to get a little more complex. Try this code:

Dear Matt,many thanks for your help: your patch solved perfectly the visualization problem. Moreover, I modified the submission.tpl file to display also authors name and affiliation.

To assist the review procedure I was wondering if it could be feasible to have together with the on-screen view of the metadata also the possibility to have a printable pdf version of the abstract metadata. Do you think it would be possible in future releases of OCS?

You're right the file is still there, for reasons that I don't understand the 2 lines I had before don't work in 2.3but this seems to be a more general issue with my upgrade to 2.3. I am encountering many little and not so little problems. Probably should have stayed with the stable release but it's too late now to go back!

My real problem now is that all prepared email templates have disappeared. I would be happy to go backto the default ones, but when I click on "reset all templates" the list goes back to only 5 prepared email in it. So I am havingpeople who are submitting abstracts as we speak and they are getting a blank email instead of an aknowledgment.

Any suggestion about what to reset to get back the default prepared email would be greatly appreciated.Help!

Regarding the prepared email templates: is this the case for all locales? Can you check the email template file (English, for example can be found in locale/en_US/emailTemplates.xml) to see if there are in fact more default templates there than are being reloaded? Best to check this for each locale you support.

it is strange, inside locale/en_US/emailTemplates.xml all templates are still present, if I look inside the file, but they do not appear when as a conference manager I look at prepared emails. Clearly something has got corrupted somehow.

I did a clean install of the system in a new folder with a separate database and it is fine and it has all the templates. The problem is that now I have a working version, and a corrupted version which contains all the info about my conferences. Where would you suggest I should go from here? I mean the version that is misbehaving has all sort of important info in it, and is currently being used for a conference (though I have to type out all my emails because they otherwise would go out blank). My understanding is that conference specific data and non-conference specific data, like the default email templates, are stored in the same database. So how do I merge the system that works with the one that does not work?

Before giving up on your original install, try reloading the locale(s) that are giving you trouble -- you can do this from the Site Administrator -> Languages page for any installed locale. You will lose any custom email changes, though. If this doesn't do the trick, let us know.

Thank you, reloading the locale did restore the default templates. I wish I had thought of that earlierbut I never thought of looking under languages. The installation now works ok, there are still a fewproblems but of course it's possible that this has to do with the fact that this is not a "stable" release yet.

However, given the complicated set of problems I had with this installation (it had to be restored from backup after a hardware upgrade) and given that I have a separate installation that is more recent (same version though), would you suggest that it would make some sense to compare the two or even, more simply and brutally, overwrite the directories like lib and classes (which should not contain anything specific to my conferences)?

It's probably not a bad idea to do a diff between the two installs' files, just to make sure that everything in the troubled install is up-to-date. I wouldn't worry about reuploading the files unless that produces any differences.

This thread had drifted away from the original topic: "Non blind review of OCS abstracts "That was my fault as I had encountered some upgrade problems.I am now happily using 2.3.2.0 and would like again to have the review non blind.The hack that once worked was basically these two lines:

Now when I do this the page is not loading any longer when it reaches those lines. I suspect that some naming has changed. For instance what used to be $submission->getPaperTitle()is now $submission->getLocalizedTitle()

I am not very confident with changing the code, I am really just looking for the easiest way toachieve a non blind review system. Can someone tell me how to change the lines so that they willwork, or any other method (but simple) to do non blind reviewing?

A couple of quick tips on troubleshooting when you encounter a problem like this:

-- if you run into a blank page, an error is most likely being reported somewhere. That error should have helpful troubleshooting information in it. For more information on retrieving errors, see this FAQ entry, and feel free to post the error here.

-- you may also want to clear your template caches after a template file change, to ensure that you're not getting a mix-up between old and new files.

Otherwise, could you give me a better idea on where you are trying to add those lines? I can run a quick test or two, but I need to know exactly where you've tried adding them to the file. If you could give me an idea on the line number and/or the surrounding lines, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks you for your help. I did not try anything while we had a conference ongoing. Now theconference is finished, so I upgraded OCS to 2.3.3.1 (the latest version).

However, we would still like a non-blind review system. I tried to use the advisein this thread about adding a few lines to templates/reviewer/submission.tplUnfortunately I think things have moved on. The original change involved adding linesunder these lines:

So maybe instead of chasing old ideas could I ask whether you would know how to put just the name of the author on this form underneath the title? It would be very helpful and I suspect it may help other people as well who may want to switch off blind-reviewing for some conferences.

You'll have to do something like this in other places, depending on where you want the reviewer to see the author name. And of course, you may also want to do something similar so that authors can see reviewer names as well.